Glenda Jackson, who has died aged 87, was one of Britain’s most arrestingly forthright and abrasively intelligent exponents of the classics on stage and screen, and a keen political activist who latterly became a north London Labour MP.
What set her apart from her rivals was an apparent lack of vanity and an impassioned contempt for sentimentality. Tall, slim and obdurately unglamorous, Glenda Jackson was unusually serious-minded, diligent and defiantly prepared to take an unconventional view of the great dramatic heroines.
Although she retired from acting at the age of 55 to go into politics, she returned to the stage a quarter of a century later as Lear in the Old Vic’s production of King Lear (2016), a resurrection so dramatic in itself, one American critic observed, that it might have overwhelmed the drama she was actually enacting.
“Glenda Jackson is tremendous as King Lear,” concurred Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. “No ifs, no buts. Returning to the stage at the age of 80, 25 years after her last performance, she has pulled off one of those 11th-hour feats of human endeavour that will surely be talked about for years to come.”
“Her rich, mighty contralto, plumbing the deepest tones of the female range, is remarkably undiminished,” reported another critic. “It is still one of the great voices of the theatre… generating that mysterious friction that makes Jackson so electrifying.”
The role echoed her commanding portrayal of Elizabeth I in the six-part BBC television costume drama Elizabeth R in 1971, when she presented the monarch as a grotesque, theatrical figure, her face a chalk-white mask, daubed with rouge, crooked painted eyebrows, high forehead and sharp nose.
Not without a sense of humour, and driven by a desire to strip from the job of acting whatever glamour might attach to it, Glenda Jackson was among the least “charming” of actresses – on stage, at any rate. Coming to prominence in the early days of the newly-established Royal Shakespeare Company, Glenda Jackson cornered the market in serious heroines. Whatever gift for comedy she possessed came out best in her films. Even then, it was ironical and dry-witted.
A celebrated occasion on which she let her hair down in public was while playing Cleopatra at Stratford-on-Avon, when she accepted an invitation from Morecambe and Wise to appear on their programme in a spoof of Shakespeare’s tragedy: her deadpan relish of the fun endeared her to viewers.
In private she was not lacking in humour, either. During a gruelling rehearsal for Peter Brook of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, she successfully pleaded for a few moments of repose – “Let us all shut our eyes” – while she and other players sneaked away on tiptoe to a pub.
As for Oscars (she was awarded two), Glenda Jackson contrived to pick up neither. Nor did she wear make-up unless ordered by her director.
Renowned on television as Elizabeth and on stage for the gloomier roles (Ophelia in Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, Racine’s Phedra, Lorca’s The House of Bernada Alba), her performances tended to oscillate between hits and flops. But few actresses strove harder to hit the artistic nail on the head.
If her seeming aloofness prevented her from winning audiences over as often as she wished, she refused to ingratiate herself. “I do not like audiences,” she once said. “They mostly want what they have liked before.”
Two things persuaded her to give up acting in the 1990s. As a middle-aged actress, she knew that fewer tempting roles would come her way because the repertoire was more limited for women than men. And as a lifelong socialist she abhorred the Thatcher regime. So, after 20 years as a political activist, she stood successfully for Parliament in 1992, becoming a sincere and conscientious Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate (Hampstead and Kilburn from 2010 to 2015, when she retired).
There was a crossover with her acting life: during the 1992 campaign, the Labour leader John Smith was put out to discover that a supporter in Hampstead had decided to switch to the Liberal Democrats “after seeing Glenda Jackson starkers” in a television repeat of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers.
In the first Blair government, she served under John Prescott between 1997 and 1999 as parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, with responsibility for transport in London.
The eldest of four sisters, Glenda May Jackson was born on May 9 1936 on the Wirral and brought up at Hoylakein a close-knit working-class family. Her father Harry was a bricklayer and her mother Joan a part-time cleaner.
Young Glenda attended first Hoylake Church School and then West Kirby Grammar School for Girls which, as a “fat, shy and acned” pupil (her words), she left with three O-levels. While working at the local branch of Boots the chemist she joined an amateur dramatic society, which led to elocution and fencing lessons.
With a local authority grant, she trained at Rada. When a leading agent saw her Eliza in Pygmalion, he wrote: “She has an individual quality which is not going to appeal to everyone, but there is an enormous sex appeal.” What a cameraman described as a “wonderful lighting about the eyes” was interpreted by one critic as a “cold, sleepy and cruel look”.
After spells in rep at Worthing and Hornchurch, she made her West End debut in Alex Samuels’s All Kinds of Men (Arts, 1957). At Crewe rep she met and married a fellow stage manager, Roy Hodges, and in her early twenties toured as a bewigged grandmother in A Girl Called Sadie. Back in the West End in 1963 she played a pick-up girl to John Neville’s Alfie (Mermaid and duch*ess) in Bill Naughton’s play.
It was an American critic-director, Charles Marowitz, who gave her her first break. Working alongside Brook for the RSC, Marowitz saw her in Alfie. He persuaded Brook of her unusual talent for their experimental Theatre of Cruelty season at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 1964.
There, in a revue inspired by Antonin Artaud, Glenda Jackson was formally stripped, bathed and dressed in a prison uniform, all to the accompaniment of a spoken report of the recent Christine Keeler case. What attracted Marowitz was her way of “lounging around the rehearsal room looking like a scrubwoman, her face not only not made up but seemingly scrubbed raw as if to obliterate her features, emitting great waves of languor tinged with ennui”.
After roles including the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the petulant tomboy daughter in Brecht’s Puntila came Ophelia in Peter Hall’s production (1965) of Hamlet with David Warner’s beatnik Prince. Was this “quacking deb of an Ophelia… more likely to smoke pot than go potty at her father’s death?” Alan Brien wondered. Or was she, as another critic argued, “exceptional and electric, full of rancour and unsentimental”?
The playwright Hugh Leonard could hear “the click of numerous minds snapping shut all over the auditorium but I say the hell with them: this is acting!” For Penelope Gilliatt, Glenda Jackson was “the first Ophelia I have seen who should play Hamlet”.
In Brook’s production of Marat/Sade, Glenda Jackson, suspecting that “we were all going loony”, feared for everyone’s sanity; but her ritualistically flailing with her long golden tresses of Marat, with its erotic charge, remained in the memory of every playgoer who saw it.
Brook’s controversial staging of US (Aldwych, 1966), a semi-documentary protest against the war in Vietnam, showed Jackson in a less inspiring though impassioned frenzy; and after a more personal success as the prosaically waspish wife in John Mortimer’s The Collaborators (duch*ess, 1973), her acting in Genet’s The Maids (Greenwich) verged on the monotonous – “great bursts of emotional effusion,” noted Marowitz, “unexpectedly cut short by flat, catatonic delivery”.
As Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (Aldwych, 1975), however, the actress discovered a new tone of cowardice for an otherwise familiar heroine. Here was acting against the grain, and most critics relished it. Trevor Nunn’s revival toured to Australia and the US.
As Vittoria Corombona, though, in The White Devil (Old Vic, 1976), the actress’s cynicism and world-weariness erupted tiresomely again; and then as the poet Stevie Smith in High Whitemore’s Stevie (Vaudeville, 1977) – which, like Hedda, was filmed – she triumphed.
It was while playing for the RSC a kaftaned and crop-haired Cleopatra to Alan Howard’s Antony in Brook’s 1978-79 revival that Glenda Jackson joined Morecambe and Wise on TV for her delightful, self-mocking spoof. Some viewers rated it above the Stratford interpretation.
Was Jackson a Shakespearean? She confessed herself impatient with Brook’s “scrutiny of that bloody text”, and seemed more at ease as a discontented, married, middle-aged schoolteacher in Andrew Davies’s Rose (Duke of York’s, 1980, New York, 1981). Her taste for sarcastic comedy was also glimpsed as Eva Braun in Robert David MacDonald’s Summit Conference (Glasgow and Lyric, 1982).
Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which presented its characters on two levels at once as they commented out loud on their motives, proved for Jackson another triumph, both in London (Duke of York’s, 1984) and on Broadway.
After an uninspiring version of Racine’s Phedra (Old Vic and Aldwych, 1985) and an amusing Hollywood satire, Charles Wood’s Across from the Garden of Allah (Comedy, 1986), Glenda Jackson presented perhaps her most potent characterisation of all, a vivid, fey portrait of emotional repression in the title part of Nuria Espert’s revival of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (Lyric, Hammersmith and Globe, 1986-87).
Among later, pre-politics, stage roles were Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (New York, 1988), which London never saw, and a strikingly drab Mother Courage (Mermaid, 1990).
Glenda Jackson’s career in the cinema was sometimes equally controversial – especially at its start in two films by Ken Russell. One, from DHLawrence’s novel Women In Love (1970), brought her an Oscar as one of the suffragette sisters amid the Nottingham coalfields The other, The Music Lovers (1971), was a grotesquely bombastic exercise in cinematography, in which as Tchaikovsky’s bride she loyally simulated a series of self-induced and supposedly shocking org*sms.
In John Schlesinger’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday (also 1971), Glenda Jackson played a divorcée torn between two sexually ambiguous men, sharing in much thrashing of limbs and facial twitchings. The role won her a Bafta. And though judged “a disgrace to British womanhood” – insufficiently seductive – by some critics as a raving, uninhibited divorcée in A Touch of Class (1973), the lightness of touch in a bittersweet comedy brought her a second Oscar. In Joseph Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman (1974), her sexual escapade as the unsatisfied wife of a jealous novelist also gave more pleasure than critics supposed.
In Howard Zieff’s House Calls (1978), her display of polished high comedy reached new heights opposite Walter Matthau; and as a working-class girl in Alan Bridges’s study of wartime amnesia, The Return of the Soldier (1982), Glenda Jackson meant more to the hero than his uppish, upper-class wife.
Other film credits included Queen Elizabeth in Mary, Queen of Scots (1972), Turtle Diary (1985), The Rainbow (1989). Her outstanding screen comeback role – after the success of Lear on stage and then, in 2018, a Tony award for Three Tall Women on Broadway – came in the BBC One drama Elizabeth is Missing (2019), a wonderfully subtle depiction of an old woman losing her short-term memory to dementia and navigating her world with dignitythrough Post-it notes; the performance won her another Best Actress Bafta.
Later this year she will be seen in cinemas opposite Michael Caine in The Great Escaper, playing the wife of a war veteran who absconds from his care home to attend D-Day commemorations.
Glenda Jackson, who was appointed CBE in 1978, was married to Roy Hodges from 1958 until 1976. They had a son, Daniel, who followed her into politics, then became a columnist for the Telegraph and other papers.
Glenda Jackson, born May 9 1936, died June 15 2023
